Everything Changes

short of a Rockwell painting, and I want to pull him up by his shirt and hurl him out the front door on his ass.
    “Hey, Zack,” Pete says. “We’re watching Indiana Jones.”
    “Zack,” Norm says, pleased to see me. “What brings you here?”
    I stand in front of the television and slap Delia’s card onto the coffee table. Norm picks it up and I watch the trajectory of his reaction, from curious to surprised to comprehending to defensive. “Why don’t we step outside,” he says somberly.
    “Why don’t we stay right here,” I say.
    “What’s going on?” Lela says.
    “You’re blocking the TV,” Pete complains, craning his neck to see around me.
    “When were you going to tell us?” I demand.
    “Tell you what?” Lela says.
    “That he’s got another son.”
    Lela inhales sharply. “What?”
    Norm closes his eyes. “I wanted to tell you,” he says to me. “I was waiting for the right moment.”
    “Which, I guess, you were hoping would come some time before Delia managed to track me down.”
    “Delia’s the mother?” Lela says.
    “Delia’s a stripper,” I say.
    “She’s a dancer,” Norm mumbles defensively.
    “I’m confused,” Lela says, standing up, and somewhere in the part of my brain that isn’t on fire, it registers that she was sitting extremely close to him, practically spooning, and that there might have been something more intimate than I thought in the atmosphere I shattered with my arrival. She looks at Norm expectantly. “Is Delia the mother? Are you married?”
    Pete looks around, belatedly realizing that something of significance is happening, and grudgingly pauses the video. “This is the best part,” he grumbles softly.
    “I’m not married,” Norm says emphatically to Lela, and there it is again, a separate message woven into his words on a private frequency, and now I’m fairly certain that Norm’s quality time has not necessarily been restricted to Pete. Maybe I’m imagining it, or maybe I was naÏve not to have expected it from the start, two lonely former lovers, one of them hopped-up on Viagra, sleeping in separate beds under the same roof for four nights running now. Either way, I’ll never ask, and they’ll never tell. “Susan died about seven months ago,” Norm continues.
    “And who was Susan?” I say.
    “She was my wife.”
    “So you’re a widower?”
    “Technically, no,” he admits reluctantly.
    “Let me guess.”
    He nods. “We were divorced two years or so before she died.”
    “When Henry was about two.”
    “I guess so, yes.”
    “Henry’s your son?” Lela says.
    “What’s going on?” Pete says, squinting as he tries to follow the conversation.
    “Go to your room, Peter.”
    “What for?”
    “We need to have a private talk.”
    “But the video,” he protests.
    “We’ll finish it in a little while.”
    “This sucks,” Pete says, but he pulls himself off the couch and heads dejectedly upstairs, wondering how it all went so wrong so fast.
    “So basically,” I say once Pete’s gone, “you got married again, had a kid, got divorced, again, and were off doing your whole deadbeat father thing, again, when your ex-wife dropped dead, leaving you suddenly in charge of a four-year-old boy you barely knew.”
    “I took care of her while she was sick,” Norm says defensively. “She had no one.”
    “She had you, but then, I guess no one ever really has you, do they, Norm?”
    Norm’s head sags like I just kicked him in the crotch, his hands clasped tightly in front of him, trembling in his lap. “I thought we were past all this,” he groans.
    “Me too. Turns out we’re not.”
    “Zack,” Lela says softly.
    “No, Mom. He’s been lying to us the whole time.”
    “He had trouble telling us something,” she says. “You’re not so different yourself. How long did it take you to tell Hope you didn’t want to marry her?”
    “That’s not the point,” I say, turning to face Norm. “He could have brought Henry with him. It would have been perfect, introducing us to our half brother. It’s got all the drama you could ask for, and we all know that Norm can’t resist drama. Instead, he comes on his own, leaving his son with a stripper, for Christ’s sake, and for much longer than he agreed. It just doesn’t make sense, even for a shitty father like him. So I have to ask you, Norm, what did you really come back here for? Because I don’t think anymore that it was just to make amends.”
    A thin ring of